Fructose Metabolism
Sugar and Spice, Not so Nice – The Valley Patriot
The Valley PatriotSugar and Spice, Not so NiceThe Valley Patriot –
As Def Leppard once said back in the 1980s, Pour Some Sugar on Me.
But that’s about all I would do with sugar now, because I refuse to eat it.
The average American consumes approximately 152 pounds of sugar a year, roughly 22 teaspoonfuls a day (which is about 355 calories).
Did you know according to the American Heart Association, the recommended amount of sugar is between six and nine
teaspoons of sugar a day? When trying to avoid added sugars, watch for ingredients like raw sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, sucrose, and molasses. Added sugars are the worst ingredient in our diet, it has no nutritional value and can have harmful effects on your metabolism and of course can contribute to weight gain and other diseases.
Sugar is one of the leading contributors to obesity and people that consume more sugar are more likely to be overweight or obese. For a lot of people (me included) sugar and junk foods can become an addiction just like abusing drugs or alcohol. The more cookies, candy and donuts I ate, the more I wanted…, it was my happy place or so I thought. Sugar releases dopamine, the feel good chemical in the brain and there have been studies that suggest dopamine plays a role in impulse control and addiction. So when I’m on a diet and I hear someone say you can have anything you want “in moderation”, I know it just doesn’t work for people like me who are addicted to sweets because the only thing that I know will work is complete abstinence.
Right now there is an epidemic in America known as type 2 diabetes. It currently has afflicted about 27 million people, and another 86 million people have been diagnosed with pre diabetes. I was diagnosed with pre diabetes back in January 2015, I was very unhealthy and eating the wrong types of foods. I was addicted to sugary sport and energy drinks and getting little to no exercise. They say there is no cure for type 2 diabetes but I was able to reverse the diagnosed pre diabetes and I was taken off my medication by staying away from sweets and sugary drinks, following a program consisting of a protein based, nutrient dense diet with moderate exercise.
Fructose powers a vicious circle — ScienceDaily
‘… But there’s a downside: the liver converts fructose…
Fructose powers a vicious circle — ScienceDaily’… But there’s a downside: the liver converts fructose very efficiently into fat. People who consume too much high-fructose food can in time become overweight and develop high blood pressure, dyslipidaemia with fatty liver and insulin resistance — symptoms that doctors group together under the name metabolic syndrome.Unchecked 
growth of the heart muscleA new paper by Krek and his team member Peter Mirtschink describes a further, more troubling side effect of fructose. The researchers have discovered a previously unknown molecular mechanism that points to fructose as a key driver of uncontrolled growth of the heart muscle, a condition that can lead to fatal heart failure. Their study was recently published in Nature.
Fructose is a major component of dietary sugar and its overconsumption exacerbates key pathological features of metabolic syndrome. The central fructose-metabolising enzyme is ketohexokinase (KHK), which exists in two isoforms: KHK-A and KHK-C, generated through mutually exclusive alternative splicing of KHK pre-mRNAs. KHK-C displays superior affinity for fructose compared with KHK-A and is produced primarily in the liver, thus restricting fructose metabolism almost exclusively to this organ. Here we show that myocardial hypoxia actuates fructose metabolism in human and mouse models of pathological cardiac hypertrophy through hypoxia-inducible factor 1α (HIF1α) activation of SF3B1 and SF3B1-mediated splice switching of KHK-A to KHK-C. Heart-specific depletion of SF3B1 or genetic ablation of Khk, but not Khk-A alone, in mice, suppresses pathological stress-induced fructose metabolism, growth and contractile dysfunction, thus defining signalling components and molecular underpinnings of a fructose metabolism regulatory system crucial for pathological growth….’http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature14508.html
